Last week in China – A Lot of Baidu and a bit of Microsoft and Google

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Last week in China, a Lot of Baidu and a bit of Microsoft and Google

There hardly goes a week by that Baidu is not in the news. They are actively getting into new partnerships, boasting about their Market Share and releasing new services. Google has yet to find a way to counter this. The rest of the search engines are too marginal at the moment. Let’s see what happened in the last week.

Microsoft will show Baidu’s PPC ads

Baidu has made a deal with Microsoft to show their paid advertising on their Chinese properties, among them MSN, Live and other partner websites in China.

This isn’t necessarily a monster catch for Baidu. Yes, Microsoft draws 465 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, but it’s still little more than a bit player in China. And even though it may one day find itself wanting to break from Baidu and begin selling its own ads in China, it’s unlikely to happen for a few years, if the slow stateside rollout of AdCenter is any indication.

It may be not a monster catch but it’s a good deal for Baidu in their attempt to raise their international profile. They also recently announced to expand their search product to Japan

Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy

estimated that the deal with MSN could result in 50 million more daily searches for Baidu to feed ads into, with the result of between $10 million and $20 million in incremental revenue. Even at the high end, that would make up less than 10% of the company’s revenues next year.

Baidu’s market share still increasing

If you would ask Chinese internet research company Iresearch, they will say yes. If you ask Baidu they will say the same. The strange thing here is that Baidu released the new market share data before Iresarch released their latest report. On the 13th of December Baidu issued a press release announcing they have now a market share of 63.7% compared to Google’s 19.2% (market share in visits in October 2006). The next day Iresearch released the full report.

Google doesn’t agree with the data and has challenged the way Iresearch does its work. It’s not known whether Iresearch was aware that Baidu would release the data before they did. It does show Baidu tries to be PR savvy.

Another part of the report shows that the difference is bigger when you look at Keyword queries.

Industry sources told Reuters this week that the two Internet search leaders have independently had early discussions with some local video Web sites for potential business cooperation or possible acquisitions.

However, neither Internet giant has secured a specific target yet, said the sources with knowledge of the situation.

“I think it’s a very natural move. Especially for Google, it definitely wants a local version of YouTube as it already established the Chinese version of the Google Web site,” the source said.

The source, who declined to be identified, said Google is considering whether to simply translate its global YouTube site into Chinese or build up a brand new “YouTube China”, possibly through the acquisition of a local video-sharing Web site, which may cost more time and money.

The top 10 blog providers in China

Blogging is popular in China and there are 1,460 blog service providers at the moment (and probably increasing each day).

There are 1,460 blog service providers in China, which is 55% more than last year. But of the top 100 blog service providers in China last year, 20% have gone out of business.

There are 52,300,000 Chinese-language blogs in China maintained by 1,987,000 bloggers at 2.6 blogs per blogger. Only 0.43% of the bloggers own individual domain names, which means that most bloggers are using blog service providers.

It’s the end of the year and time for the yearly search roundup. If you like to find out what Chinese users have been searching for this year you can take a look for yourself in Chinese or in a translated version.

China’s most popular search engine has compiled several top 10 lists for 2006, such as top 10 movies, top 10 TV series, top 10 fastest increasing search words, etc. Most of these are either based on the results in their search engine or statistics from their BBS posts.

The top male pop star was Jay Chou, the top “why” question was “why was there a Long March?,” (“why is there marriage or why must one get married” came in at number 10), the top “how” question was “how to lose weight,” the top “what” question was, naturally, “what is love?”

The top internet star was Sister Hibiscus, the top dish was sweet and sour pork chops, and the top pet was the Tibetan mastiff.

Curiously the top pet has a shoulder height of more than 35 centimeters which is more than is allowed in cities like Beijing.

–Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, China.